Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 21

Regrouping

Have you ever wondered what the hell you're doing or where the hell you're going? I'm in one of those places, right now, which I hate. I get immobilized trying to figure out some path of action, not at all aware of which one would be best or worst or anything. Like I'm trapped in a cage, of sorts.

All of a sudden, I have back-to-back packing jobs the middle weeks of February, one in LA, one in Chicago, and I'm frozen trying to figure out the best way to handle them. Add a day to LA and fly to Chicago? Not sure what I'd do...especially with the fires still going and a large part of the city in ruins.

Come home to Buffalo then fly to Chicago? That means about a 24 hour turnaround between trips, but might be best. Even though I don't like how rushed it'd be.

At the same time, I have to work in a Zoom meeting about my bankruptcy, while I'm in LA. Only positive about that is it's on East Coast time so I can, hopefully, do it before I go into the job.

I'm still not happy that I'm doing that. I have too great a sense of responsibility for other things and people to just kick back and let it happen. And there's a lot of guilt involved, and not Catholic. Protestant...which can be much harsher.

It's said Protestants experience guilt when they don't fulfill their basic duties or experience shortcomings, and it may be more non-constructive or non-instructive than Catholics. That ol' Protestant work ethic. You are what you build or earn.

What's funny is, I got another first draft of a chapter for BDO done and it's ending with an idea expressed by Irin. If you want to fuck a guy over, pay him what he's worth. If you want him to fuck himself over, pay him what you're worth.

I have no idea where that came from or what it really means, but it fits my confused mindset at the moment.

Breather...

Chapter 16 of BDO turned out to be a lot of running up and down and fighting and sneaking around and climbing, until Dirc and Irin were in a safe enough place to relax. And reconnect in full.

No sex in this one, just the two of them floating in an underground pool, embracing and kissing and supporting each other.

They are heroes in this story. Doesn't matter how many men they helped to kill. I think I've built not only empathy for them both but respect and a connection. They love each other, fully and completely, and it's shining through.

When I wrote How to Rape a Straight Guy, I let Curt take me places I didn't know I could go. He was a wounded animal loose in the LA streets, and he ruined people's lives...and I put him in prison for it. I've gotten responses to him where readers acknowledge he did horrible things...but to their horror they still felt sorry for him.

That was the first time I thought maybe I could write a story about a monster and have the reader connect with them, emotionally. I've come close to doing it a couple other times...but there was always a reason for them to be as angry and destructive as they were. I also had a moral platform to lay their actions on, and a punishment for their transgressions.

I also made the victims of their actions deserving. Like in Hunter, where he gets started in the MM Slave Trade with guys from Mexico who've been hurting local people...before segueing into just taking random men...until he's slapped in the face with the consequences of what he's done. Then tries to make up for it.

Not this time. The closest I come to excusing Dirc's and Irin's actions is they were killed. Dirc was shot in the back by a cop, who was them made into a meal for the Beast. Irin's death was due to a fall during a scuffle with another cop, which happened around the time of Dirc's trial. They're brought back to life and from that point they are out to help the alien in its endeavors. Not so much out of gratitude but because it pays them in gold.

Now they've lost everything and don't know what to do. All they have is each other, a bit of super strength thanks to being reborn, and a need for revenge.

And I have no idea what will happen from this point.

Pulled here and there...

Got a lot going on, now. I'm handling a pickup of archives in the UK, which is no big deal except what I thought was happening is not completely correct. And the timing is a bit tighter. But it'll work out. No books involved, just paperwork.

Also did diagrams for another shipment going into containers, to see how many we'd need. And another job got quoted, though I don't think the gentleman will like the price. But it is what it is.

On top of this, I'm taking a class to present to the bankruptcy court to show I've learned to live within my means. I was put off by its claim that if you put $100 into a stock group you'd bet a 10.5% return, which it used consistently as if it's a given fact. Did you know that if you put $100 a week into that stock group for 30 years, you'd have a million dollars! If you included compound interest.

Funny, but i always thought those things had all kinds of fees in them to wipe out your accrued interest. And who the hell can afford to make that much in savings, these days?

The only time I invested in stocks was when I had a 401K at Heritage, and that was the only way they would contribute to my retirement fund. When the store downsized I closed it and paid the penalty, and lived off that and unemployment for 15 months as I tried to get work in film. Or sell a script. Something.

Didn't work. I did get some storyboarding jobs but that was it. I also made a little extra cash doing book packing, which led into working with Caladex. So it helped...

I then spent the evening getting Dirc and Irin out of that underground building, in BDO, and intensifying their connection with each other. This is the first chapter with no sexual encounter, at all. I need to go through it, again, and freshen it up a little. But overall I've just been doing a single real rewrite on each chapter before posting.

I'm living dangerously.

Fuck it...

As I'm writing the latest chapter of The Beast Dines Out, I find myself making it into a wild and crazy escape, where Dirc manages to find a way out of a room that's 2 miles underground.

Well...out of the room and into an emergency stairwell, with Irin in tow. Dirc is in loose pajama bottoms when they escape...but Irin is naked, so when they go through a kitchen he grabs some clean aprons and fixes them like a kilt around him.

Which works. Because as everyone knows, you don't wear anything under a kilt. And he's now got a sexy slit up each side to show off his legs to even better effect. Woohoo...very important in a story of MM erotica.

Reminds me of something that threw me off when I was watching Rob Roy, with Liam Neeson as the title character. Yeah, an Irishman playing a Scotsman, right.

Anyway, it was in a theater on a massive screen, and there is a moment when Rob's hands are bound and he's being dragged behind a horse...and he falls. And his kilt flies up. And you can clearly see...Liam's wearing white briefs! Oops...

Of course, I think he also had a pierced ear, but I'm not sure if I remember that right.

But...back to my story, which has become wild and crazy. It's coming out the lower regions of Area 51 may have been built down into a large cave, rather than having a space that far underground hollowed out. So if the guys can get out of the building, they might have a chance to get away. Or, at least, fight back...and have some fun...

But it amazes me how the story has circled around from the Beast having crash landed into a cave at the beginning of the story to Dirc and Irin using a cave to escape the Area 51 doctors and guards.

Here we go...

Felon#47 has already started hurting people. He's rescinded the executive order lowering drug costs, pardoned the J6 traitors, closed the Spanish language site at the White House, withdrawn us from the World Health Organization when we're on the cusp of another pandemic, renamed Denali and the Gulf of Mexico, and ordered US Passports to depict the birth identity of everyone.

Meaning Caitlyn Jenner is now back to being called Bruce. I hope they're happy. I don't remember if Jenner fully transitioned. I recall some discussion about it but blocked the backstabbing shithead from my mind. So if they haven't they might have to get rid of their tits in order to use a passport. If they have, tits may still have to go.

And this is as Muskrat is running around giving a Nazi salute of joy. Which the cowards on the right and even some Jewish groups are refusing to accept as a Nazi salute, but are giving him all sorts of excuses. Fucking pathetic.

Europe knows. Ukraine knows. And motherfucking Putin sure as hell knows. So does Xi. We're screwed.

I'm still cutting back on my social media involvement. I can barely handle Facebook, Xitter and Instagram, right now, so no way am I joining anywhere else. 

I hope to be done with The Beast Dines Out soon, before the Christo-fascists start shutting down the websites they dislike. I think I found a way for Dirc to get himself and Irin out of the Area 51 bunker they're held prisoner in. We'll see how it goes, tomorrow. Right now, he's being beaten for attacking the Cute Guard he had his eye on, and has realized the Beast has abandoned him.

It's growing even more amoral, this book...and it is now officially a book. Both parts add up to well over 50,000 words. I like that. I'm letting out a lot of anger and aggression with it. Between this and limiting my social media involvement, my blood pressure's gone down 12 points.

Good therapy, and cheap.

The end of time...

I found this on Quibbler – a conversation between @beeftony, @justplainsomething and @adrianestpierre that segued into a discussion about how it’s like Stockholm Syndrome, a made-up claim used to silence people who have the audacity to understand the reasoning some people have behind their criminal actions.

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Gaston really is the most terrifying Disney villain because he could be anyone in the world.Later he convinces the whole town to set up his wedding with the knowledge that the would-be bride would be thrown into it. Everyone finds his creepy tactics as cute and boys will be boys-esque. So yeah, heis terrifying.

Yeah, the truly scary thing about Beauty and the Beast isn't that Gaston exists, but that society loves him. People who deride the movie bysaying it's about Stockholm Syndrome are ignoring that it's actually about the various ways that truly decent people get othered by society. People don't trust the Beast because of the way he looks, which only feeds his anger issues and pushes him further away. Gaston isn't the only one who criticizes Belle for being bookish, either; the whole town says there must be something wrong with her. And her father gets carted off to a mental asylum for being just a little eccentric.

Howard Ashman, who collaborated on the film's score and had a huge influence on the movie's story and themes, was a gay man who died of AIDS shortly after work on the film was completed. If you watch the film with that in mind, the message of it becomes clear.

Gaston demonstrates that bullies are rewarded and beloved by society as long as they possess a certain set of characteristics, while nice people who don't...are ostracized. The love story between Belle and the Beast is about them finding solace in each other after society rejects them both. 

Notice how the Beast reacts when the whole town comes for him. He's not angry, he's sad. He's tired. And he almost gives up because he has nothing to live for. But then he sees that Belle has come back for him, and suddenly he does.

In the original fairy tale, the Beast asks Belle to marry him every night, and the spell is broken when she accepts (like the Jean Cocteau version). In the Disney movie, he waits for her to love him, because he cannot love himself. That's how badly being ostracized from society and told that you're a monster all your life can fuck with your head and make you stop seeing yourself as human. 

Society rewards the bullies because we've been brought up to believe that their victims don't belong. That if someone doesn't fit in, then they have to be put in their place, or destroyed. And this movie demonstrates that this line of thinking is wrong. It's so much deeper than a standard be yourself message, and that's why it's one of my favorite Disney movies.

Also what really grinds my gears about people that bring up Stockholm syndrome is that it was literally made up to gaslight a woman who sympathized with some bank robbers. ...A woman who got kidnapped as a hostage (there were 4 hostages in a bank for 6 days) found out WHY they were robbing the bank and sympathized with them. Then when she said "hey, actually they're not that bad. They weren't trying to murder or grape or anything, they had a reason." 

Some "men" essentially said "poor stupid girl can't keep her hormones under control, she must love him. Poor thing." (Especially when she said she was more afraid of the incompetent police shooting her than the robbers.) Rather than actually listen to what she was saying they literally made up a whole syndrome to claim she was manipulated.

The former hostages said straight-out that they didn’t want to cooperate with the police afterwards because they were angry with the police’s actions during the robbery, then some dickhead psychologist who had never even interviewed them came up with the idea that they had actually refused to cooperate afterwards because they had “fallen in love” with their captors.

It's the exact same thing here. Rather than see how Belle ONLY started liking the Beast AFTER he started being kind to her and the fact that they built a friendship that eventually turned into romance people claim it was "poor stupid girl can't keep her hormones under control."

It's disgusting.

(And as a side note, we are entering a time when a Gaston-like "man" is in the White House sending people out to terrorize and destroy anyone not WASP like him.)

Chapter 14 is uploaded...

This one is really insane, for me. 2500 words where Dirc is put under intense examination that borders on rape, really. But since, officially speaking, he's dead...you can't rape a dead man, even if he is still alive. So he's bound and his clothes are cut off and he's probed and tested, like a lab rat.

I also finally explained that one of his clones was substituted for him when the Beast took him out of an unnamed observation room, earlier. But it doesn't have the brain capacity of him, so that's how the lab-techies know he's the real Warren Dircum.

And I've officially brought Area 51 into it, people who want Dirc to explain what's going on because they know he's got contact with an alien...and are alluding to using Irin as leverage to get him to talk.

This story keeps rattling on and I have no idea where it's going to end up, or when. It'll go until it's done.

I'm doing my best to ignore the hatred and cruelty being spit around by the MAGAt crowd. They laugh and lay blame for the fires in LA, crowing about God's judgment and all that shit, then calling democrats angry and unforgiving and mean when we spit back. It's ridiculous.

Let them kill the country. No one in power really seems to want to stop them. Democrats talk a lot but don't really fight. That's half the reason we're in this mess.

My one hope is that McDonald's will do its job and take out Felon#47. Of course, that means JD Vance of the 3 or 4 names will be come president, but he doesn't have the cult following of that orange beast so maybe it'll all fall apart.

One can dream.

Slogging along...

I uploaded chapter 13 of The Beast Dines Out to GayDemon and am now working on chapter 14. And it looks more and more like there will be a 15 and maybe even a 16 or 17. Depends on how Dirc gets out of his predicament.

 He's run headlong into people from Area 51 who are trying to figure out who and what the Beast is, and who know Dirc and Irin are connected to it, in some way. Irin's vanished and Dirc is fairly certain the lab techs have taken him, so lets himself get taken, as well.

Here's the bad part. The Area 51 people killed Irin's dogs, Alge and Anth, because they were protecting him. Learning that sets Dirc off and things are going to get nasty, especially since the Beast is ignoring Dirc's mental calls to him.

I have no idea where this story is going or how it will wind up. I'm plotting it as I go, and Dirc is having fun. There's lots of MM sex in it, both consensual and not, and the usual twists and turns. And by killing Irin's pup the Lab Techs have set themselves up for some serious John Wick time.

You don't kill the dog.

This may wind up being the start of a major smorgasbord of male dishes... 

Redone...

Got word from Ingram they've reset my cover to glossy so ordered a copy via rush service. I hope to get it quickly. I'm up for jury duty next week, and would like to get it on a day I don't have to go in.

In Buffalo, you don't report to the criminal courts till they want you. They send you a number and you call the night before to see if they've chosen it. If they have, you go in and, I think, join the pool to possibly sit on a jury. Very different from the last time I did jury duty. That was in Houston, and they had us come down and wait in a room till the end of the week.

Back then, I got called for a juvenile delinquency case that should have lasted half a day, but wrangling by the DDA and defense kept it up for 3 days. And while we had the feeling something had been going on with that kid, the DDA didn't prove their case and we found for the defense. Took half an hour to decide, on the first ballot. Then we sat around for another half hour so it wouldn't look like we'd rushed anything.

So long as I can have my laptop and phone with me, I'm fine. But I'm also taking a book, just in case.

It snowed all day with strong winds blowing it sideways. Kept it from building up too much. I had been thinking of going out to get some DPZ and such, but blew it off. It's expected to get above freezing, tomorrow, so I may do some running around, then.

I may not. I dunno. I'm pretty depressed. In 3 days that convicted felon will be sworn in to the presidency, and his scowling minions are already working at tearing down everything Democrats built up since Roosevelt, while billionaires salivate at paying even fewer taxes than they already do. Demons walk the earth, and they are MAGAts.

God only knows what will happen...

Shit, shit, shit...

I got my hardback copy of APoS-HNH today and for some amazingly stupid reason I cannot even begin to understand, I asked for the dust jacket to be matte instead of glossy. ARGH!

I mean, it looks good. But if I was going for matte I'd have brightened the face a bit more and let the background stand out better. But I want the books to be of a kind, and that ain't it. So fucking stupid. I really thought I'd been careful... 

But that's the story of my life. I always fuck up somehow in some way. No matter what I do or how well I think I'm doing it, even when I'm taking care with typing out a sentence, I'll leave out a letter or reverse two of them or misspell a word...and just noticed I spelled stupid as stulpid.

I need an assistant just to keep watch for my fuckups.

At least the interior is fine. Haven't found my next typo, yet.

I've corrected the setup and when it's finalized I'll get a new copy...which means it's not time to celebrate, yet. At this rate, it never will be.

I poured some of this anger into chapter 13 of The Beast Dines Out...and god, I hate that title. My biggest fuck up, there.